Delivery of media, such as video, music, and pictures, across networks can raise many issues. For example, sharing of digital files, such as music files, led to the situation that arose with Napster™. Owners of the content objected to having their properties being freely distributed with no payments being made to the owners.
Video on demand, such as through cable and satellite providers, may result in issues at the distribution, or head, end. The head end hardware must be extremely robust and the connectivity must be very high, as the content is delivered from one central location. This results in high start up costs, and continued operational costs.
Other types of media distribution, such as rentals, present their own issues. Rental stores must track the outstanding rentals and charge fees for overdue rentals. This decreases consumer satisfaction. Other media distributors, such as NetFlix, may suffer from high costs due to low consumer turnover of the media. Every copy of a movie owned by NetFlix has a cost associated with it. As the users are flat fee users, when a user holds on to one copy of a title for a long time, the profit made from that copy decreases.